Hi MichelPM! Thanks for your help. I really do appreciate you taking the time to compile a list of these apps. Unfortunately, just for the record, they don’t really solve the problem, since all of them are just programs that open and “preview” (a misleading term) the images. I already use the best graphics program available: Photoshop. To use another program to open them just see which ones I need to open in Photoshop, would, of course, be silly. That is exactly the problem the Mac Finder’s icon-view-thumbnails are supposed solve. But when they only display the generic TIFF icon for half the images in a folder, it fails at its job. Granted, some of these “preview” programs might open the file a little faster than Photoshop (with all its bells and whistles), but I work with large commercial-grade images, and even the simplest “preview” programs, like the OSX Quick Look feature for example, take time to open the images and create what they call a “preview.”
More info, for those interested in this topic: Yes, I understand that my large-sized images are at the root of the problem. But, as I said earlier, I’m happy to let the Finder sit and work to create the thumbnails, at the expense of other computing tasks. The problem is that the Finder just gives up rendering preview-thumbnails at some point, leaving some rendered and others unrendered (displaying the generic TIFF icon instead), with no option to force it to continue until all are rendered.
Within the last day or so, I’ve learned a couple things about how OSX works with icon-preview-thumbnails, the most important of which is that OSX first looks to see whether the image file contains an embedded preview icon of its own. If yes, it displays that ready-made icon instead of trying to create one itself. Many graphics programs, like Photoshop, will automatically embed a preview icon once the image has been opened/modified/saved. So, this does present a fairly good workaround for me: Simply do a batch-file-process in Photoshop on each folder of new images: open/modify-in-some-minor-way/save/close. This makes a permanent preview icon that OSX will display every time. It takes forever on my large images to do a batch process on a folder of new images, but once its done, its done forever. No more relying on Finder to render the thumbnail.
Still, I would be happy to find someone who could write an actual solution (perhaps an applescript), forcing Finder to render all previews on images without a ready-made embedded preview. I can’t help but to consider this a bug that should have been fixed years ago. Either Finder CAN or CAN NOT make preview thumbnails; it shouldn’t consistently crap-out half way through the process. To me, that’s a bug, plain and simple.
